SUTUKIL RESTAURANT

Sutukil: Dining on fresh seafood by the seas of Mactan island
When you’re in or anywhere near Lapu-Lapu City in Mactan Island, you have to try sutukil. Sutukil is a portmanteau of the three ways fish are cooked in eateries near the Mactan Shrine: Su is for sugba or grilled, tu is for tula or prepared into a soup and kil is for kilaw or turned into a raw fish salad.

Sutukil restaurants let you choose whatever you want cooked from stalls of fresh fish, prawns, crabs, seaweeds, shells, clams and even lobsters (click on photos to view larger images). These seafood are as fresh as seafood can be and the crabs and lobsters on display are still alive as you pick which ones you want cooked. Sutukil eateries get their daily supply of fresh seafood from fishers in nearby islets.

Many people love to eat in the place and it’s packed on weekends, especially during mealtimes. When we got there last Thursday, however, we were the only customers in the eatery we chose as it was mid-afternoon on a weekday.

We chose a local fish, molmol, because its white meat is great for kinilaw. The woman who sold us the fish did not bother asking us how we want it prepared. When I asked her how it would be cooked, she simply said sutukil. Everyone who eats fish in the place get this triadic culinary treat: sugba, tula and kilaw.

We also bought half a kilo of prawns and got four of the biggest prawns I’ve seen in my life. Each prawn weighs 1/8 of a kilo and I found, in hindsight, that one piece would have been enough for me since we already ordered fish.

The eateries are open-air and you dine in full view of the Mactan seawaters and rows upon rows of mangroves. What is it with waves, my wife asked me, that you get hypnotized as you stare into the deep? The view is surprisingly calming, for an urban corporate rat like me.

But off to eating:
The dishes were served in less than 15 minutes with fish soup brought first. The molmol’s head, tail and other un-kilawable and unsugba-able parts went into the soup, which is garnished by spices and seaweeds. This is the tula and being in Cebu, you do not pronounce it as it is spelled, you say tuwa or tua. True-blue Cebuanos do not pronounce the letter l in most words. Tula is the Cebuano word for the process of preparing a certain type of soup or sabaw, Bisaya for stock. The dish is called tinuwa, the prefix ti denoting that it is a product of tuwa.

The tinuwa tastes great if you haven’t tasted the dish yet. But for tinowa connoisseurs, which I fancy myself to be, it’s just passable. It wasn’t hot enough for my taste, a few more sword peppers would have done the trick.